The 2006 Giro d'Italia winner Ivan Basso yesterday received a two-year doping penalty from the Italian cycling federation for two offences, possession of banned substances and use or intended use of banned drugs or banned practices. He is eligible to race again in October 2008, however, as the suspension has been back-dated, but he will miss next year's Tour and Giro.

Basso, who last month acknowledged being implicated in the Spanish blood-doping probe, known as Operation Puerto, which uncovered large quantities of anabolic steroids, blood transfusion equipment and more than 200 bags of blood during police raids in Madrid and Zaragoza, had asked for clemency after his admission that he had attempted to dope in the build-up to the 2006 Tour de France.

He confessed on May 7 to having blood removed from his system with the intention of having it reinjected to enhance his performance in the Tour, but has maintained that he never actually used the blood. The International Cycling Union had asked for the maximum ban of two years to be handed down.

The Italian said yesterday: "I've never asked for indulgence or pity. I've made an error and deserve to pay for it, but I want to be judged according to the rules and not on account of my name. I just want a just punishment. I will pay for my mistakes but I want to repeat that I have told everything I know, which is not easy for an athlete at my level." More than 50 cyclists have been named as having worked with the doping ring exposed by Operation Puerto but Basso is the first to face a ban over the affair.

In an autobiography to be published in the United States on June 26, two weeks before the Tour de France starts, last year's winner Floyd Landis alleges that the US Anti-Doping Agency offered him the chance to have any potential doping ban reduced if he could provide it with information that would incriminate the seven-times Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong.

Landis is currently awaiting the outcome of a two-week hearing which, subject to appeal, will decide whether he should be stripped of the 2006 Tour title because of a positive test for the male hormone testosterone. In the book, Positively False: The Real Story of How I Won the Tour de France, Landis reiterates his innocence. The book is not scheduled to be published in the UK, according to its publisher, Simon & Schuster.

"I did not use performance-enhancing drugs in the 2006 Tour de France or any other time in my career," Landis says in the book, quoted in the New York Times yesterday. "All I ever did was train." Since the positive test was announced last August he has consistently claimed that there were errors in the testing procedure.

His assertion that he was asked to inform on Armstrong, his team leader at US Postal Service in the 2004 Tour, is the first instance of its kind in cycling. "I didn't have any evidence to give them about Lance," Landis writes. "If Lance had been doping, he sure didn't tell me about it."

Armstrong's successor as the first man to Paris asserts: "All I know is that I never saw anything to indicate that Lance used performance-enhancing drugs, that his blood and urine were tested more than anyone else's, and that he never returned a positive test."

The book also offers more detail on the most dramatic episode of Landis's recent hearing, when he fired his former business manager, Will Geoghegan, in the courtroom after the revelation that Geoghegan had made a threatening phone call to the three-times Tour winner Greg LeMond over a confession that LeMond had made to Landis that he had been sexually abused as a child.

Meanwhile, Alexandr Vinokourov continued to show impressive form in the Dauphiné Libéré, the penultimate race before the Tour de France. The Kazakh, who will start as favourite when the Tour leaves London on July 7, finished second on the stage to Digne-les-Bains behind his team-mate Antonio Colom after the pair had escaped on the final hill. Another of Vino's team-mates, Andrey Kashechkin, retained the leader's yellow jersey.

About this article

Cycling: Basso handed two-year ban for doping offences

This article appeared on p12 of the Sport section of the Guardian
on Friday 15 June 2007.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 07.10 EDT on Saturday 16 June 2007.
It was last modified at 07.10 EDT on Monday 25 June 2007.
It was first published at 07.10 EDT on Monday 25 June 2007.